This thesis explores women's experiences in rural areas under state socialism in the GDR and in the New Germany since 1989. The study is located within feminist geographical thinking and draws on a variety of qualitative and quantitative sources. Data for the research were collated through various research methods both qualitative and quantitative including correspondence, focus group interviews, key informant interviews, and the consultation of documentary evidence and statistical sources. The thesis employs a modified grounded theory approach. Data were processed and analysed using the computer-assisted analysis programme NUD.IST Version 4.0. The thesis focuses on questions that emerge from a critical analysis of social transformation. A key concern is to evaluate how dominant patriarchal power structures have impacted upon women's everyday lives under socialism and capitalism. Three main themes are foci of this thesis: the changes in social dynamics in rural villages, the impact of economic rationalisations on women, and the nature and extent of women's participation in new political structures. With reference to the former GDR the research showed that many rural women found comfort in social relations they established within the village and the workplace. Such social networks became important elements for women's self-identification and helped counteract suppression through the patriarchal socialist State. German unification overthrew previous values and daily routines of many rural women through vast economic and political changes. The unfamiliarity with a new, sometimes undesirable framework of reference for everyday life and society caused many rural women to withdraw to the private sphere and question their previous identities as rural GDR citizens. Positive opportunities for women's futures have not outweighed negative experiences with transition. Instead, conflicts have prevented women's equal integration into the political and economic structures of the New Germany. Further areas of research are proposed that may add depth to insights gained from this thesis as well as offering possible areas for gender-sensitive policy development in rural Mecklenburg-Westpommerania.

Blockchains, like many “disruptive” digital media, continue to garner significant academic and popular attention about what they are. Recent critical provocations in geography and cognate disciplines shift lines of enquiry to interrogate the material realities of digital technologies, emphasizing instead how they are lived. Inspired by critical and feminist thinking, the primary task of this dissertation is to follow the latter mode of analysis and present a critical cartography of blockchains, loosely defined. The critical cartography presented in this study sketches a conceptual and methodological map of context-specific and intimate blockchains practices I participated in and experienced from 2013-2020, in a mostly Canadian context. I construct this cartography by using a variety of autobiographical and auto-ethnographic methods that are sometimes buttressed by more conventional qualitative methods. Research reveals that blockchains have the capacity to become economic in a diversity of ways, enacting multiple rowdy characteristics of capitalism, a phenomenon I term rambunctious capitalism. Rambunctious economic flows actualizing through blockchains rely on different situations of power to enact nomadic subject/ivities in a variety of spatial, temporal, and material contexts. Specifically, the blockchain practices addressed in this dissertation highlight the embodiment of joyful moments for a pregnant body working in Toronto’s crypto-economy, the algorhythmic impacts of blockchain hard fork events, where code participates in the instantiation of diverse temporalities that produce uneven geographies, and the materialization of Canadian policy discourses about blockchains that position and, in some cases, implement these media as smart solutions to civic service delivery. Findings presented throughout this study contribute to feminist and digital geographies by offering autobiographical, auto-ethnographic, and intimate accounts of blockchains, and how they are practiced as lived and multiple realities. In addition, this dissertation also adds ethnographic research to the now expansive multi-disciplinary scholarship on blockchains and cryptocurrencies to understand how these media operate in specific contexts. / Graduate